David Denby

“A morally scrupulous left-wing bohemian family, the Popes, to my eyes, are not that different from families living above ground. Nevertheless, Running on Empty is a celebration of their greatness: The family that flees together stays together! Like the Swiss Family Robinson, the Popes have been forced by their extreme situation to use ingenuity ...

“It takes a certain shamelessness to sell some sixties radicals to the public as the ultimate American family, but that's what writer Naomi Foner and director Sidney Lumet have done. Running on Empty is fluently made, likable, and touching, but it mostly avoids the issues of how you live with radical values in this society ... Arthur (Judd Hirsch) and Annie Pope (Christine Lahti) ... yearn for normalcy....

“More than fifteen years ealier, Arthur and Annie blew up a government-funded laboratory that was manufacturing napalm for the war in Vietnam; a janitor, who wasn't supposed to be around at the time, was blinded. In the following years, as their radicalism subsided, they developed a faith in lawfulness. This is all very well, but it's hard to swallow the movie's treatment of the past event as a kind of infinitely regrettable mistake, a mere accident--as if death and dismemberment were not always a possibility when explosives are set off....

“.... Christine Lahti, as the mom who knows that the children cannot be sacrificed to their parents' mistakes, is a radiant, emotionally generous actress. Her empathy holds the picture together. She even triumphs in a tear-stained, only-in-Hollywood scene in which Annie meets her estranged father (Steven Hill) and asks him for help while reminding herself and him why she revolted from him in the first place. She's pulled this way and that--humiliated by her need yet still angry at ther father--and the conflicts in Lahti's face are furiously beautiful, like currents raging against one another.... “

David Denby
New York, September 26, 1988